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I'm just coming into my final year of university so I'm going to start looking for jobs as a software developer and I just wanted to know just how important it is to be able to design good looking interfaces and produce good quality content in a software development job? I'm only asking because I struggle to be creative due to my dyslexia but If given a design to do (i.e. a picture or description of some sort) I am able to do it to a high standard, Will this affect my career options? |
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The blatantly obvious answer is: yes, this will affect your career options. But only in as much that you won't be able to go for jobs where designing the UI is a (major) part of the job description. And, as the others mentioned, most software shops have either dedicated UI/UX designers or at least someone else who writes the specifications of what the software is supposed to do and that usually includes a mock up or description of the UI. So actually, no, don't worry about it. And who knows, training can overcome many of the drawbacks of dyslexia, so the struggle may become less the more UI designs encounter and implement. |
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I doubt it, because it's not often you get a job where the UI design is left entirely up to you. If you are working for a large corporation as part of their code-monkey team, they usually have a team UI Designers as part of their staff. If you're working for a small company with only a handful of developers, or as the sole developer, you're in charge of an entire application, including the UI design, so you get a chance to sit down with the requester and have them tell you what they want |
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Most development shops will have someone else to design the UI for you. They'll give you the UI design, your responsibility will then be to implement it. You'll be expected to design the UI yourself only in very small companies. The problem lies in getting your career started. You will find that no one will want to hire you until you have shipped a product to end-users. For example all the job board posts seeking iOS or Android developers require that applicants have published Apps that are in the respective App Stores. The way around that is to write a program all on your own. It's up to you whether you give it away free-as-in-beer, shareware, payware or open source. However you distribute this first application, it's important that you write it, that you do a good job writing it, and that you ship it to actual end-users. That program will need to have a well-designed UI. If you cannot design the UI yourself, maybe you can find someone to help you. When I was trying to break into Mac development for the first time, I wrote a simple vector graphic editor in C called CircleDraw. I brought the binary to job interviews with me on floppy disk, and put a hardcopy of the entire program's source code in a binder. |
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